You might assume that evolution gave Charles Darwin enough to ponder during his five year voyage on The Beagle.
But of all the phenomena the naturalist encountered circumnavigating the globe, it was the flight of spiders which continued to puzzle him.
Darwin noticed that hundreds of spiders would inexplicably land on the Beagle even on a calm day without any wind to blow them on board.
Posted in biotech/medical, materials
In a new study, researchers have attacked cancer stem cells on two fronts: glycolysis and oxidative phosphorylation.
According to a new study published in the journal Cell Metabolism, it might be possible to attack cancer by exploiting its own cellular metabolism rather than by employing drugs to kill cancerous cells directly [1].
Study summary
A new technique has produced the highest performing inverted perovskite solar cell ever recorded. A team of researchers from Peking University and the Universities of Surrey, Oxford and Cambridge detail a new way to reduce an unwanted process called non-radiative recombination, where energy and efficiency is lost in perovskite solar cells.
The team created a technique called Solution-Process Secondary growth (SSG) which increased the voltage of inverted perovskite solar cells by 100 millivolts, reaching a high of 1.21 volts without compromising the quality of the solar cell or the electrical current flowing through a device. They tested the technique on a device which recorded a PCE of 20.9 percent, the highest certified PCE for inverted perovskite solar cells ever recorded.
Researchers are still working towards increasing efficiency and stability, prolonging lifetime and replacing toxic materials with safer ones. Researchers are also looking at the benefits of combining perovskites with other technologies, like silicon for tandem cells.
University of British Columbia researchers have found a cheap, sustainable way to build a solar cell using bacteria that convert light to energy.
Their cell generated a current stronger than any previously recorded from such a device, and worked as efficiently in dim light as in bright light.
This innovation could be a step toward wider adoption of solar power in places like British Columbia and parts of northern Europe where overcast skies are common. With further development, these solar cells—called “biogenic” because they are made of living organisms—could become as efficient as the synthetic cells used in conventional solar panels.
As we develop robots with increasingly human-like capabilities, we should take a closer look at our own. Only by learning to overcome – or at least evade – our cognitive limitations can we have long and fruitful careers in the new global economy.”
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The Cognitive Limits of Lifelong Learning (Project Syndicate):
“As new technologies continue to upend industries and take over tasks once performed by humans, workers worldwide fear for their futures. But what will really prevent humans from competing effectively in the labor market is not the robots themselves, but rather our own minds, with all their psychological biases and cognitive limitations …
Galaxies collide with each other on a pretty regular basis. Our own Milky Way, for instance, has gobbled up dozens of smaller galaxies in the past, and Andromeda is currently hurtling towards us at 109 km (68 mi) per second. An international team of astronomers has now found evidence of a celestial smash-up between the Milky Way and an unknown dwarf galaxy that took place around eight to 10 billion years ago, and forever changed the face of our home galaxy.
According to the researchers, the evidence for this cosmic collision is all around us, from the bulge at the center of the Milky Way to the spread-out halo at the very fringes. The now-defunct dwarf galaxy has been dubbed the “Gaia Sausage,” after the ESA’s Gaia satellite used to plot out the trajectories of its stars, and the apparent shape those measurements revealed.
“We plotted the velocities of the stars, and the sausage shape just jumped out at us,” says Wyn Evans, co-author of the study. “As the smaller galaxy broke up, its stars were thrown out on very radial orbits. These Sausage stars are what’s left of the last major merger of the Milky Way.”
Posted in biotech/medical, military, neuroscience
https://paper.li/e-1437691924#/
They have been called the main news channel internationally and have a wider range than CNN and Al Jazeera. They have also taken the right to broadcast the best documentary on the development of mind control as a major political program. The Spanish TV-producer Daniel Estulin made the 25 minute presentation and interviewed Magnus Olsson who presented examples of victims that can be subjected to life-destructive research without their consent. The introduction gives a picture from the 1960s CIA project MKULTRA with tens of thousands of victims and a research based on state crime, medical abuse and kept beyond public attention.
University hospitals in the United States and Europe were central places where patients were implanted, utilized and misused for a life time of brain research and experiments. That situation has a similar pattern internationally and was built in behind the military and intelligence agencys classified operations. In Sweden the military research institution FOI became the innovator, knowledge bank and educated professors and physicians in collaboration with hospitals where the project was given highest priority.
The documentary’s original language is Spanish but has got English subtitles to be shown world-wide. Daniel Estulin has by far made the strongest warning about the hidden techno-political development. Mr. Estulin is also one with the strength of the challenge and his presentation gives an expression that fits the crucial mission he proclaims. While interviewing people on the street of Madrid, both school children and adults show examples of the unknown technology and its use:”…I have never heard about it … It sounds too fantastic… Can it really be like that…” Something normal of a techno-political development hidden from media and the public.
Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World” (Crown), by the economic journalist Annie Lowrey, is the latest book to argue that a program in this family is a sane solution to the era’s socioeconomic woes. Lowrey is a policy person. She is interested in working from the concept down. “The way things are is really the way we choose for them to be,” she writes. Her conscientiously reported book assesses the widespread effects that money and a bit of hope could buy.
It has enthusiasts on both the left and the right. Maybe that’s the giveaway, Nathan Heller writes.
Posted in space
A lunar phenomenon will be visible in the country on July 28. The eclipse begins at 1:13 a.m. www.cnn.ph
